The Core is Four.

 

No, not THAT Core of Four!

Four hitters. That's the key to winning a ring.

Four good, reliable, major-league hitters. At least.

Even after the worst weekend of the season (so far), baseballreference today puts the Yankees at 98.8 percent sure to make the postseason, 78.3 percent sure to win the division, 29.1 percent likely to win the AL pennant, and 15.1 percent likely to win the World Series.

This makes them the favorite to win it all, out of every team in the American League—and every team in the show, save for a certain outfit that plays over in Flushing, which is at 16.9 percent.

Not gonna happen, my friends. 

Your new York Yankees are not going to make the World Series, much less win it. I don't know if they will even win the division.

The reason?

For once, not pitching (though I suspect that the Yankees' staff will get dangerously worn down as the season proceeds).

For once, it's hitting. The Yankees don't have it.

As many have noticed, Aaron Judge seems to have hit one of his slides, in which he seems terrifyingly unable to see or hit strikes. Granted that the umps have been screwing him royally of late (something that no longer seems to agitate our manager, for some reason), he struck out 9 times in 11 at-bats in Fenway. 

It's been sadly established that our Mr. Judge, a phenomenal player and dedicated captain...is simply not all that clutch a hitter.

Reggie Jackson once explained to me that guys are usually not clutch because they are trying to do too much, and I think we can certainly see that in most of Judge's sloughs.

The Estimable Keefe demands that he bat first, like Ohtani. Like most of us here, I don't agree with that argument. I prefer Judge where he can drive in as many runs as possible, preferably early in the game.

But I doubt that hitting him third, as I would prefer, would really help the Yankees' run production much, either.  

The reason?

The Yanks simply don't have enough hitters to both get on base before Judge and protect him when he's at the plate.

What history tells us is, in the modern game, at least, is that you need at least four (4) decent, respectable major-league hitters to take it all.  

Every single, Series-winning Yankees team of the past had at least four—some six, or seven, or even eight. 

It's true, as well for almost every other Series champion, from every other franchise. About the only exception I can really think of, offhand, are the 1965 Dodgers, who were playing near the nadir of the 1960s pitchers' era, in a pitchers' park...and with Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Claude Osteen at the head of the rotation.

It would, I suppose, be possible for this version of the Yanks, the new, 1-0 kings of baseball, to play the sort of ball the 1965 Dodgers did: desperately hunting and pecking for runs, playing first-rate defense.  

Keeping their heads in the game. The whole game.

But that would mean having a manager like, well, Walter Alston—or Carlos Mendoza—instead of Friendly Aaron Boone. It would breaking away from algorithm baseball, and the swinging for the fences all the time, every time.

It would mean having consequences for getting picked off second, or stealing third on your own, or otherwise running the bases "like drunken sailors," in The Master's words.

The Dodgers can get away with batting Shohei Ohtani first, because they have people like Mookie Betts and Will Smith, and above all, Freddie Freeman, hitting behind him. That's on Brian Cashman. But if the Yanks really do want to contend, they're going to have to face the fact that the only real hitters on their team are Aaron Judge, Paul Goldschmidt (who is 38), and maybe half of Cody Bellinger.  

That adds up to 2 1/2. Which is not 4!